Google Analytics is much more robust than most people give it credit for. Contrary to popular belief, it can do most of the things more advanced analytics suites can do, except Google does it for free.

Many web designers and developers complain about the limitations of Google Analytics. At first glance, it doesn’t seem as powerful as some of the other web analytics suites out there because it doesn’t let you track outbound links or see data in real time. So, developers flock to premium products like Clicky and Mint, but those services can be expensive, especially if your web project isn’t generating any income yet. Also, while they fix some of the limitations inherent in Google Analytics, they lack some of the Google-only tie-in features, such as Adwords and Adsense tracking.

For those of you who don’t know, Google Analytics is a web statistics service that allows you to see how many people visit your site, what pages they go to, and where they are coming from. It’s a free service, and it works by sticking a piece of Javascript in your HTML code that loads when someone visits your page.

But, that only scratches the surface: it also allows you to create specific campaigns, goals, funnels, and reports that builds actionable data-sets and provides key insight into otherwise nebulous data. Most people have analytics set up, but a lot of them fail to dig into the data and miss golden opportunities to optimize their site. Every time you change the copy, structure, or design of your website, your web analytics suite will tell you what you should change (and whether you should make any changes in the first place). By using the advanced features in Google Analytics, not only will you obliterate most of the reasons for paying for another analytics service, but you will understand your audience and your website in ways that your competitors on the web often won’t.

6 Powerful Google Analytics Features

Here are six advanced features you can use to power up Google Analytics and turbocharge data-driven decisions:

1. Figure Out Where Your Audience is Going By Tracking Outbound Links

Even if your bounce rate is low, it is still key to understand where your visitors are going when they exit your page. By understanding the outbound link behavior of your users, you can optimize your website for conversion and your brand messaging for strategically maximum effect. This is true for two reasons.

First, many web business models rely on driving traffic to a page that is located on a different domain. A good example of this is affiliate programs where you have to drive traffic to a landing page to make money. If you track the behavior of that outbound link, you’ll know which domains convert the best. Paired with an 80-20 work ethic, you can then focus all of your marketing efforts on those media channels, and reserve your new found free time to test out new ideas, perform freelance work, or take a nap.

Second, by tracking outbound links, you’ll know which spots on your page convert the best, and then you can plan according as to which links you want to put in that prime position. For instance, you might want to remove a low value link and replace it with a link to your best content, or to an outside blogger who has helped you significantly. If you find that none of your inbound or outbound links are converting well, you can easily pair up Google Analytics with Google Website Optimizer to do some split testing.

Now that I’ve convinced you to track outbound links, here’s a crash course in how to do it. If you’re using a custom-made CMS or web app, the best way to do it is to stick the following code into the <head> portion of your page:

This will delay links from loading by fraction of a second, giving Analytics time to record the click before the user leaves the page. Thankfully, the delay is so small that it won’t affect the user experience, so you need not worry. Then, you can track any link you want by adding the following onClick function to the links you want to track:

There are two parameters in recordOutboundLink that you might want to change to further customize your report. The second parameter, which has the value of Outbound Links in the example above, refers to the folders that will be used to organize your data when you view it in Google Analytics. Renaming Outbound Links is a good first start, but it isn’t descriptive enough to properly segment all of the data you’re going to collect. A better way might be to classify outbound links by type: either “blog,” “landing page,” or “social media.” Or, you can do it by the position on the page: “top,” “sidebar,” or “bottom.” The third parameter in the list is the individual identifier of the page. The truncated domain is a perfectly sane value for this, but you could also rename it to something more memorable if you would like, such as “Hongkiat” or “Facebook.”

Outbound link tracking is even easier to implement if you’re using a popular CMS or web framework. If you’re using WordPress, you can track links automatically with the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. On Rails, you can bake this into your models with the Google Analytics Gem.

2. Get Real Time Statistics (Kind of)

One of the main reasons why people use something other than Google Analytics is because they want built-in real time statistics. And they’re right when they complain about how Google Analytics can’t do that. But you can use a simple trick to get almost up-to-the-minute statistics without shelling out cash for a premium service. Google updates your statistics on an hourly basis. To get that data, all you need to do is click on the date selector calendar in your Analytics report, and select the current date as the end date. Of course, this data isn’t completely up-to-date, but up to the hour is likely close enough to take fast and intelligent action when your content goes viral.

Normally, when you click on the date drop-down, you’ll notice that the blue bar indicating the selected date only goes up to yesterday. To get it to show real-time data, select the first date in your preferred range, and then click the latest date that isn’t grayed out. And voila! You have almost real time tracking.

3. Track Social Media Buttons

Social media is a powerful way to drive traffic to your site. Most bloggers encourage their readers to share their content via Facebook and Twitter – and when their users actually do so, it can be enough to bring in tens of thousands of new readers, subscribers, and consumers. We all want to go viral on social media. Therefore, it makes sense to track which users click on the buttons so we can focus our attention on the users that will reliably make our content go viral.

When I launched Auric, my newest blog, I wanted to make sure that social media was incorporated as a key part of the experience. That meant tracking social media actions in the same way that I tracked page views so that I could view all of the information in the same report (and hopefully affect both with the same action). If you use the Facebook OpenGraph API to incorporate the ubiquitous “Like” buttons into your content, it’s incredibly easy to track the users who click on it. First, though, if you aren’t already familiar with embedding Facebook buttons on your site with the Javascript API, you’ll want to read up on it over at the Facebook Developers site.

In a nutshell, you’re going to merely add an onClick function to your FBML code that allows the event tracking engine in Google Analytics to fire up when people click on the button. Here’s what the modified code will look like:

When a user clicks on the Facebook button, Google Analytics will track it as a pageview, allowing it to show up in your reports in much the same way that a blog post or landing page would. Here, _trackPageview has one parameter that specifies how the click will appear in your reports. I recommend customizing each of the buttons on your site by including something like the blog post ID, the permalink, or a URL-escaped title (like advanced-google-analytics), followed by /facebook on the end. Then, you can see how each individual button is performing, and also easily aggregate the data together by searcing for all instances of /facebook in your Google Analytics reports.

You can use this technique to hack together event tracking for almost any clickable element on your page. For instance, it’s simple to implement this on Twitter’s official retweet button. All you have to do is call _trackPageview asynchronously, and you’re good. Here’s how I would do it:

Just like in the Facebook example above, you can edit the sole _trackPageview parameter to customize how retweets appear in Analytics. I generally set my tracking identifiers to end in /twitter, but you can make it whatever you want.

4. Create Custom Campaign URLs to Track the Effectiveness of Link Building Campaigns

While tracking how many users interact with your social media buttons will give you a level of insight significantly higher than most other sites on the web, it won’t automatically tell you how effective social media buttons are at getting new users to visit your site (a la viral media). Of course, with a few modifications, you can easily change that. Google Analytics allows you to set up custom campaign URLs that automatically categorize and track the users who come in via those paths. To do it, all you need to do is add some parameters after the URL in the standard ?variable=value format. Here’s the variables you can use:

utm_campaign identifies a specific product or campaign. You might set this to retweet_button or facebook_like.

utm_source identifies where the traffic is coming from. Think of it as the site name or the URL. For a social media tracking campaign, you might set it to facebook or twitter.

utm_medium describes the type of traffic, such as cost per click, organic search traffic, or RSS. Here, you might set it to social_media.

For tracking a social media campaign, I would use a URL like the following:

Now, the trick is to make sure that this is the URL that is shared on Facebook and Twitter. All you need to do is to append the tracking variables to the end of the URL set inside the settings for the social media buttons, and you’re all set. Building on the Facebook like button code illustrated above, it would look like this:

Of course, social media is not the only use for campaign tracking URLs. I also use it in my RSS feeds in order to get a more accurate snapshot of content usage within feed readers. It allows you to calculate the true value of a new subscriber, and focus your energy on the subscriber segments that will provide the most value to your site.

5. Use Custom Variables to Refine Data

Out of the box, Google Analytics only tracks pages, and it tracks each page in exactly the same way. For most, this is fine because you can usually tell which page is which by looking at the URL. However, Google Analytics is much more powerful than that – the system is flexible enough to let you build a model of your site’s content organization scheme right within Google Analytics. Then, you aren’t limited to tracking mere pages anymore. In fact, you can adapt it to track categories, tags, sections, or whatever other taxonomy you can think to throw at it. This is especially helpful with web applications and e-commerce sites where you might want to track specific actions or types of products.

Harnessing this power is as easy as sticking custom variables directly into your page code. The only sticking point is that variables are restricted to specific scopes of visitor engagement. Google Analytics offers the following three scopes:

Page

Session

Visitor

You can read about the scopes in Google’s custom variables documentation. It can be a bit confusing at first, but the best way to think about it is by the thing you’re trying to segment. For instance, if you want to compare pages that are in one category versus another category, you would use the page scope. If you want to compare whether a user is logged in, you would use the session scope. The visitor scope is best used when you want to compare different types of users.

Here’s the basic code you’ll need to put in the <head> section of your page to get started with custom variables:

The 1 in the code above refers to the index. Analytics only gives you five slots for custom variables, so you can pick a number from 1 to 5 to assign it to a slot. You can only use a slot once, so you’re limited to having only five custom variables at a time.

The Category text is the name of the variable. You can set it to whatever you want. If you wanted to track tags on your WordPress blog, for instance, you might set it to Tag.

Photoshop Tutorials is the value of the custom variable. In the tag example mentioned above, you would set this to the name of the tag. If you’re using WordPress or another CMS, you’ll want to use the appropriate function to set this dynamically.

Finally, the last parameter sets the scope. 1 is the visitor scope, 2 is the session scope, and 3 is the page scope.

Whenever I launch a new site, I generally spend an hour or two fidgeting with the design and the code to make sure that everything is perfect. From there, I’ll usually do some initial link building and go to Analytics to see if I got any traffic. And every time, I would see a huge spike on the first day. For months, I thought I was an online marketing god. That is, until I dug into the data and saw that all of the traffic came from the same browser. And from the same city. And from the same IP address. Whoops.

Now, I use the IP exclusion feature in Google Analytics to make sure that my testing doesn’t skew the data (and get my hopes up for nothing). In order to do it, click on the “Edit” button for your site on the main profile page.

On the “Profile Settings” page, scroll down the page until you see the box named “Filters Applied to Profile” (below goals). Click on the “Add Filter” link, and you’ll be taken to the “Create New Filter” page.

Once you’re there, you can stick in your IP address (or range of IP addresses) so that it is excluded from Google Analytics. As soon as you’re done, click “Save Changes” and you’re all set.

How Will You Supercharge Your Analytics?

Google Analytics has plenty of advanced features that makes it possible to never need a premium analytics service ever again. With these features and the Analytics API, you can build a very powerful web statistics system that will allow you to make very successful conversion and traffic optimizations. Do you use Google Analytics on your site? How are you going to incorporate these features? And, what features would you like to see in Google Analytics that don’t currently exist?

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Logos define brands and they create corporate images because logos are what sticks in people’s mind and creates associations. Think Coca-Cola, Nike, or McDonald’s – what do you instantly picture in mind? Right, their logos. Great logos will never allow their consumers forget about the brand – it’s what prompts them choose one product over alternative: people tend to stick to something familiar, something that brings up positive associations.

While the implementation of an effective logo can set a company up for success, the opposite is also possible. When outside input isn’t gathered to evaluate logo prototypes, designers can miss major steps and the result can be disastrous. Here are 10 examples of missteps and how logos can potentially ruin corporate reputations.

Catholic Church’s Archdiocesan Youth CommissionThis logo was developed in 1973 and won an award from the Art Director’s Club of Los Angeles. This example shows how perception can adjust overtime with new generations viewing things much differently from their predecessors.

Arlington Pediatric CenterThe Arlington Pediatric Center is certainly gaining some unwanted publicity when this logo design gone impossibly wrong. While the center may employ wonderful physicians, the public will forever misperceive its services because of this tragic logo.

Office of Government CommerceEven the simple use of three letters to create a logo can generate public outrage. Rotate the logo 90 degrees clockwise and suddenly a very different image appears. The most unfortunate aspect of this logo is it’s still being used by the agency.

While it may be comical to view these unfortunate logo creations and ponder how their creators didn’t foresee the tragic misrepresentations, a valuable lesson must also be learned. A logo can make or break a company’s reputation. These examples also demonstrate the importance of obtaining alternate viewpoints on logo prototypes before a brand image is implemented.

To avoid this misuse of creativity as a graphic designer, stick to the basic graphic design principles, adhere to the guidelines provided by your clients, and solicit advice on prototypes before sending them out to the public. By following this advice, you will avoid having your designs join the ranks of logos gone wrong.

Adobe Photoshop is probably the most, if not one of the most, popular graphic editing program of our time. One of the most important element of Photoshop editing are the brushes, so it’s crucial to find the suitable brushes for your design. However, sometimes it can get quite frustrating when you can’t find the tools you need to satisfy your specific design needs. It is indeed no easy task to search through hundreds or thousands of design resources sites to get exactly what you want.

This is why we took the trouble to gather the best resource sites on the cyberspace for brushes to facilitate your pursuit for high-quality brushes. We hope these resource sites will bring out the best in you in your future designing undertakings. In no particular order, here are some of the top Photoshop brush sites available!

WOW BrushesA simplistic site with some good brushes for downloads. There are also links to other pretty useful Photoshop resources sites.

BrushLoversYet another resource site with a straightforward and effective rating system for the sets. Visitors can also check out the latest, most popular or highest rated brushes if they have no particular designs in mind.

Photoshop MosaicAs the title suggests, this site previews the various brushes in small square tiles in a mosaic-like manner for easy viewing and navigation.

BrushkingBeautiful and professional-looking brushes categorized according to themes such that it’s easy to find what you want specifically.

Q BrushesWith a users’ 5-star rating system on each brush set, a neat classification of brush types and even a tag cloud for all the contents, this awesome site serves as a resoureful station to gather quality brushes for your design needs.

PS BrushesPS Brushes showcase detailed brushes within each set. Such easy referencing and its wide collection of brushes enable designers to find exactly what they want.

Chez PlumeauThis one has lots of categories of brushes designs, so there’s no worries about finding the specific themes you need.

myPhotoshopBrushesA valuable search menu allows for the filtering of brushes according to categories and sorting them according to date, rating and number of downloads. Each set also comes with a short description of the brush and a rating system to boot.

Free BrushesA large showcase of aesthetically pleasing brushes dating back to 2007. Comments posted by users of each individual brushes allow others to evaluate the quality of the brushes before downloading them.

FbrushesWith over 6,500 high quality and professional-looking brushes to choose from, you’ll be spoilt for choice in here.

BrusheezyThe brushes here can be specifically filtered for your photoshop version, as well as sorted according to popularity, ratings and date of posting.

Brushes DownloadThis clutter-free brushes site offers a wide selection of different styles of brushes to download from.

ColorburnedApart from offering various distinctive brushes, Colorburned provides thorough descriptions for every set of brushes they post. This awesome site even has short video guides for some of their brush sets to demonstrate how the brushes look like or how they can be applied.

A mouse is undeniably one of the essential tools because as you are reading this, you are clicking and scrolling up and down. If you use a computer (duh!), chances are you depend a lot on a mouse; this is 100% true 20 years ago, maybe 80% true 5 years ago and certainly less than 50% true these day. Reason is devices like trackpads and touch-sensitive tools are taking over the role. However, designers will probably still stick with mouse because they are the more efficient companion when it comes their work such as Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.

5 years from now, if you revisited this post, you may find your right hand on a bottle of coke and this post is merely reminding you of a peripheral device you used to use – a mouse. Today's post celebrate a showcase of unusual, creative and funny mice ever created while it is still at the safe line before extinction! Full list after jump.

USB Penguin MousePenguin mouse is one of the animal theme mouse for computer. If you like these cute animals, you can buy this cute mouse for your kids.

Another Keypad MouseSanwa NT-MA2 is the name of this computer mouse / keypad combo. It’s available in white or black. The price has been set to 40 Euros.

Aircraft Computer Mouse with LED LightsThe aircraft mouse is avaliable for all folks how loves futuristic thought or for Star Wars fans. Mouse is available in black or white and features two buttons, a scroll wheel and LED lights in red and blue.

Diamante USB MouseThis computer mouse features two buttons and a scroll wheel, and it is studded with dazzling white, fake diamonds. Perfect gift for girls.

Zero MouseThe revolutionary design of the Zero Mouse combines state of the art design and lightweight materials.

Mus2 computer mouseMus2 cordless optical two-button mouse not only controls the cursor on the screen, but looks like one, too. Despite this unusual shape, Mus2 fits well into the hand and doesn’t cause any discomfort.

MLB Baseball Cap MouseBaseball fans will love using this MLB ball cap computer mouse. With over 15 Major League Baseball logo designs to choose from, this optical 2-button mouse is a fun and unique way to display your team loyalty while you work.

Body MouseBody Mouse was designed by the famous designer Chris Lomak. It does not look like a professional mouse, but funny enough for gift.

Eclipse touchmouseFeaturing elegant and sophisticated brushed-aluminum finish, the eclipse touchmouse sports an advanced feature set and streamlined ergonomics. Designed for home, office or on the go, the touchmouse delivers both style and quality.

Wireless Ergonomic Computer MouseOptical mouse has laser pointer and ergonomic design that even slightly not looks like a normal mouse. Works from up to 15 feet away from your computer.

Steelseries World of Warcraft MMO Gaming MouseDesigned by Blizzard and SteelSeries specifically for World of Warcraft, The World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse provides remarkable benefits to all World of Warcraft gamers, regardless of level or play style.

Crystal computer mouseLady beetle crystal mouse has very gorgeous style that is the best choice for fashion ladies and men.

Tortoise-shaped optical usb mouseTortoise shaped optical mouse could be first PC mouse for your kids. The design is simple, but it is very similar to real turtle, which children will enjoy.

Dolphin computer mouseSimilar to turtle mouse, it is very cute and ideal gift for a kids or you an use in your office to make fun.

Golf 3D USB Optical Computer Mouse If you favorite game is golf, this mouse is for you, but only at home do not confuse Pc mouse with a real ball and dont take it to the game.

Wowpen Joy Vertical computer MouseErgonomically designed for both right and left hand use with Bluetooth enabled computer. This compact and ambidextrous Bluetooth desktop mouse is only designed to work with Bluetooth-enabled computer systems, thus eliminating the need for a separate receiver dongle.

Creative golf mouseHere is one more golf mouse, but this time with this PC mouse comes all playground with holes that will decorate your office.

Handshoe MouseAlso called The Horse, HandshoeMouse uses the 800 dpi optical standard and practically solves the problem of muscle fatigue encountered among business and creative professionals. Hippus compared a traditional computer mouse electromyogram with the HandshoeMouse measurements.

A Steampunk MouseA steampunk mouse is crafted out of wood and brass and bone. Daniel Pon how create this awesome mouse, has carved the Paradox Mouse in LEDs with extra peripherals like a mouse skull, spine and shoulder blades.

Jelly Click MouseVery unusual PC mouse designed by Bongkun Shin, Heungkyo Seo, Jiwoong Hwang and Wooteik Lim. They created concept Jelly Click mouse. All the electronic circuits were on a small flexible board and the body itself is made of soft plastic.

Sliced MouseWhat was the idea of creating this mouse, I do not know, but it looks unusual, although not useful. The only plus is when mouse is damaged to get access to the chips.

Memory MouseMemory Mouse has such a compact form, controlled by only four fingers. This design will lessen the contact surface to provide hygienic condition and also make your bag lighter than ever.

Optical Super Slim MouseOptical Super Slim Mouse is a wireless, optical mouse with an incredibly slim profile. At only 10mm at the highest point, it almost feels like you’re using nothing at all – just a bunch of people pawing at their desks.

Bendy M 3 Dimensional MouseKim Hye-shin perceives a single strip that can be bent into the infinite-sign-shape, with only the necessary features on it. Bendy M may be a good enough design if your focus is more on the keyboard and use a mouse just as a pointer.

G-Spot MouseThis mouse is designed by Andy Kurovets and it is called the “G-Spot”. This mouse has a secret spot. When you find it, to your favorite place on the computer it’s connected to you will go.

Wooden MiceWooden mice designed by Alest Rukov is maded from types of wood cultivated specifically for industrial use, safe for the environment to manufacture and to use. All wooden components made from a single piece of solid wood.

Jupiter, Escher and Deco mouse This is trilogy of celestial orbs – three different products – the Jupiter mouse, Escher mouse, and the Deco mouse. Thes mouses are not cheap. Each of them costs about 150%.

An Alien MouseUK designer Mizanur Rehman came with a vibrant concept mouse that is described as “Alien Mouse”. Staying true to the name, the Alien Mouse is designed to mould to the user’s hand and thereby prevent RSI and reduce stress.

Wireless Building Block MouseWireless building block mouse is inspired by the same building blocks we couldn’t get enough of as kids. Complete with a right and left click button and a scroll wheel, this mouse will make those boring tasks at work seem fun.

The Computer-Mouse StarComputer-Mouse Star wouldn’t be in the least bit awkward to use or even the slightest bit uncomfortable. Well for those committed to their love for stars, this mouse would be a cute accessory to your computer.

Mario Brothers MiceDot Design 2 Super Mario Brothers computer mice from Banpresto features popular bitmap characters from the popular game series. The mice come in two designs, one featuring Mario, and the other featuring a familiar Star shape.

eVouse Mouse ConceptThis awesome and futuristic mouse has a v-shaped unique design with metallic look with a futuristic green light that illuminates on every movement, it has got action buttons just like the ordinary mouse and has got a scroll.

Grenade MouseThe mouse is actually made out of an old grenade casing, so it gives a slightly more authentic feel. This socking mouse must be the ultimate gamers mouse especially for those playing war of attrition online games.

Bling’d Out Mouse for GirlsThis bling’d out mouse designed for the ladies is “embellished” with silver and crystal accents and will go a long way toward patching up any rocky relationship.

Gold Bullion Wireless MouseThe gold bullion wireless mouse just may be the perfect gift, especially if you are worried about government deficits. Gold Bullion has standard left and right click mouse buttons, a scroll wheel and it will work with your PC or Mac.

Ghost MouseThis Scream inspired ghost face mouse features 3 mouse buttons, a scroll wheel, and a resolution of 800 dpi. that will provide you with high precision control. If you want it, you can get it for only about 35$.

Smitrix Swiftpoint Triped MouseThe Smitrix Swiftpoint Triped mouse was specially designed for tablet PCs and multi-touch tabletop surfaces and it’s eliminating the pen. Why Triped mouse? Becouse it is a mouse, a touchpad and also a digitizer pen.

Perific Wireless Dual MousePerific Mouse is a revolutionary new type of ergonomic computer mouse. It is a wireless pointing device which can be used in a variety of ways, both on and off the desk in the air.

Hybrid Monster Naga MouseThe Razer Naga Mouse, is GamesCom’s first MMO mouse, and features cool capabilities if slaying online bad monsters is your thing.The mouse has been optimised with an extra 12 buttons which are customisable to keyboard settings on the computer.

Creative Fatal1ty 1010 MouseThe Fatal1ty 1010 Mouse was designed with every last detail scrutinized by the world’s top FPS gamer, Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel. The Creative Fatal1ty 2020 mouse has a 6.4 megapixel sensor in its base to pick up the smallest twitch.

Orbita MouseThe ergonomic Orbita Mouse is a USB wireless rotating round mouse designed to enhance navigation in a wide range of Mac and PC applications.

Makeup MouseHere is the latest mouse, designed for the well groomed secretary. The cunningly hidden features include a mirror and make-up brush. Mark II now also stores Chanel No. 5 perfume and a Lipstick.